


The Facility

by FanficPhoenix



Category: Skylanders - Fandom
Genre: Blood and Gore, Dark, Gen, Horror, Implied/Referenced Character Death, One Shot, POV Third Person, Stealth Crossover, Strong Language, Suspense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-20
Updated: 2016-09-20
Packaged: 2018-08-16 05:43:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8089660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FanficPhoenix/pseuds/FanficPhoenix
Summary: It was supposed to be just another short infiltration mission - and Cynder hated it. She wanted something more, something heart-rending and meaningful. Something with less dullness and more bloodshed. She wanted it, she got it, and she regretted it.





	

It was dark.

The purple-hued dragoness clambered through the metallic hallway, eyes darting around to make sure no one had seen her. She rounded a corner, entering a large, dimly-lit room. Before her stood a massive door, stretching twenty feet from a balcony to the ceiling. Grunting, she took a quick glance at the room's contents. There were four tall pedestals close to the room's corners, each one reaching halfway to the ceiling.

 _Easy_ , the dragoness thought. _They're always triggers. Probably the timed kind, too. Nothing I can't handle._

Flapping her magenta-colored wings, she ascended... and banged her head on a metal pipe. Grunting in pain, she sliced at the pipe with her tail blade, and grinned in petty satisfaction as she heard it come crashing to the floor – if she blew her cover, she’d deal with it later. She hovered over one pillar, glancing down into it. There was a grating over a crystalline lump; probably some sort of amateur orb device.

 _Geeze, these door-locks are stupidly obvious. Has no one ever heard of keys? God, at least add some mooks, or a maze or_ something!

_...Eh, why am I complaining? Stupidity makes my job easier._

Rounding the room, the dragoness fired hot white electricity into the pillar-heads, lighting each orb.

Landing on the balcony, the figure impatiently waited for the vault to open as the cover slowly creaked upwards. Slowly.

After about ten seconds, a light flicked on inside the vault, revealing a large wall and a small door.

She briefly gave the door a sharp glare, then scanned the room behind her to make sure she hadn't been followed. She thought she could make out some sort of liquid leaking from the pipe she’d broken earlier, but she ignored it as she bashed the door open and continued onward.

 

* * *

 

_Small hallways, huge rooms. Of course._

The dragoness muttered something under her breath as she took a look around yet another large room. It was rectangular, and there was a balcony that went around the whole room and split it into two floors. There were doors along the walls on both floors, and on the bottom floor, some stairs lead up to a small and apparently useless pedestal in the middle of the room.

Leaving no stone unturned, Cynder opened and looked through all the lower doors, finding nothing but janitor equipment and the occasional rumbling pipe. Sighing, she slammed the eighth one shut and started to head back across the room.

Cynder sneezed and shook her head, grimacing at all the dust and grime coating the place. Whoever owned this place wasn’t maintaining it very well. It reminded her of the time she raided a vampire lair. For a bunch of elitist assholes, they were were complete slobs with their blood. _Disgusting._

She glanced down at the floor. Even in the murky darkness, she could make out imprints of footprints in the grime - and judging by the pattern, they were made by a fellow quadruped.

_Who the hell could that-_

“Cynder?”

She froze. _It couldn’t be…_

“Cynder!”

A second figure walked up from the second floor’s balcony, peering over the railing. The silhouette was a bit too pale, but the high pitch was recognizable anywhere.

“Whirlwind? They sent you ahead of me?”

_What the fuck are you doing here?_

The second figure placed its hoof-like claws on the railing with an echoed _clack_ , looking down at Cynder with apparent cheer.

“Uh, yeah! I told them to send backup if I didn't come back after a while. You know how it is~”

Cynder cursed under her breath. She preferred to work solo whenever she could - _especially_ if the more obnoxious ‘landers were involved. At least Whirlwind was tolerable, if not slightly irritating at times. "Yeah… right."

“Come on up! I wanna show you something!”

Whirlwind skipped off into the upper hall, leaving a disgruntled Cynder behind. She flapped her wings and landed with a thump onto the balcony, grudgingly trudging after her hybrid accomplice while coughing up dust, not noticing the long smears on the grimy floor.

 

* * *

 

Plodding on through yet another featureless, long, small, metal hallway, Cynder squinted, staring at the silhouette of Whirlwind's butt.

Something felt… off. _Somehow._

“Hey, Whirlwind?”

“Yeah?”

… _What do I even ask? “Hey, is something different about you?” “So how come you weren't mentioned when they sent me here?” “Hey, don't mind me and how I'm staring at your butt. You're just in front of me and this is all I can stare at.”_

“Nothing.”

“Nothing…or _something?”_ Whirlwind asked dramatically. After a brief silence, she started giggling. “Aha, sorry. That was… that was a joke, heh,” she said, rubbing an eye with the back of her foot. Whirlwind skipped back down the hallway, leaving an even more confused Cynder to follow her.

… _Well. That sure helped._

 _Shit, what the hell is even going on here? I can’t spot it, but I swear something’s up. What is SHE doing HERE, and… why does this all feel_ wrong _?_

Whirlwind walked up to a door. A plain, metal, lock-covered door. (Just like all the other doors. _All of them_.) She poked at a panel next to it, and flat light beam shot out of the panel, seemingly scanning her eyes. The light shut off, and Whirlwind blinked for a moment, before the door slid open. She casually skipped right on through, leaving Cynder on- edge.

 _She wasn’t_ just _sent here before me. The scanner let her through as if she lived here or something._

_…She’s been here before._

“Are you coming~?”

After a pause, Cynder slowly walked through the door, entering a medium-sized room - one with actual lighting. Dim, rippled lighting. Dim rippled orange lighting, coming from a river of strange liquid, illuminating the blood-eyed white dragon in front of her.

The dragon that was normally blue.

“Whirlwind… is that your Polar form?”

“Yeah!” Whirlwind chirped. Her normally-monochrome-blue eyes had turned bloodlike with a jaundice-colored accent. Her blue feather-scales (sceathers?) had turned deathly pale, as if all the blue had been drained away. Her scaly underparts and feather-tips (and probably the tail, although Cynder could no longer see her butt) were a shimmery off-blue – possibly teal. “Do you like it~?”

“It’s… unsettling. You look like a vampire or something.”

_Not that you ARE one. I don’t see any fangs on you. Unless you’re a pussy vamp and have venom-coated teeth or- do you even HAVE teeth?_

“Yeah. I thought it would be all cool and stuff in this place. Y'know?” Whirlwind said, as if she hadn’t heard Cynder at all. She walked off to the left, towards the river. Cynder turned to follow her; she couldn't see where the river came from or lead to, but she could see a boat in it. A small boat. With paddle-planks. And Whirlwind, sitting in it and looking back at her.

“Aren't you coming~?”

_Why the hell is there a river in an underground facility? Is this place owned by a chocolatier who murders children or something?_

Reluctantly, Cynder walked over to the boat and climbed in, sitting on some sort of plank-seat in the inside-middle-back or whatever it was. Whirlwind got out two paddle-planks (…oars, right?), placed them on both sides of the boat, then chucked them away and started up the boat via large red button. It rumbled to life, vibrating intensely, making Cynder feel like her guts were being jostled about.

Whirlwind grabbed and jerked the boat’s sides to turn it.

“Row, row, row your boat, gently-“

The boat bumped into the wall. Whirlwind cringed, then tried to steer it better.

“…not-so-gently down the… stream… thing…” She paused. “Merrily, merrily, merrily… merrily… something…”

Cynder reclined in her seat, folding her forelimbs and glancing off to the side. Dipping a wing finger into the goopy river, she side-eyed the fluffy dragoness in front of her, begrudgingly putting up with her singing for now.

“Hey, how come you seem to know this place, anyway? Do you visit this place or something? Have relatives who work here?”

“Oh, my family’s dead.”

“Oh…” Cynder reared back, unsettled a bit. “That… that sucks, buddy.”

“Yeah.”

Whirlwind stayed silent, turned her head slightly to look at her friend, then blinked a few times and went back to staring forward, leaving a puzzled and concerned purple dragon behind her.

 

* * *

 

Cynder swished the paint-like goo around with her hand. Occasionally, a few colored lumps bobbed up from the depths - most of them red - but she just brushed them to the side. Now that she thought about it, the river seemed a lot pulpier than she’d first thought. It felt pretty slimy, too – more like honey than water. Or blood, maybe. It didn’t smell as bad as blood, though. It didn’t really smell like anything.

It also looked rather… colorful.

“We're here~!”

Cynder glanced up, noticing that the boat had arrived at a fork in the road (pipe?). Whirlwind was grabbing at the corners of the walls, dragging the boat down the left path, then letting go once it had started to drift by itself.

“I’m kinda surprised you’re still here,” Whirlwind remarked, after minutes of silence.

“Well, I was sent here on a mission, wasn’t I? Gotta get information somehow. And don’t worry – if you turn out to be evil or something, I’ll just kick your ass,” Cynder responded, giving a humored chuckle at the end.

“Well- ooh, look! We’re here!” Whirlwind bounced to her feet, pointing at an arched doorway. Past the doorway was a set of stairs.

Cynder rolled her eyes as her ally cut herself off. _Quality attention span you got there._

“We're supposed to go up the stairs,” Whirlwind said, pointing to the stairs.

“Really? I thought we were gonna swim downriver.”

Whirlwind paused, a little thrown-off by the sarcasm, then jumped out of the boat and headed up the stairs. Cynder clambered out of the boat after her, following her up. The lighting in this area was better than in the others, she noticed, and she could see that the metal had an odd dark-orange hue to it (unless it was just the lighting). Briefly looking at the boat behind her, she noticed that the river also gave off a faint glow.

A faint, rainbow-colored glow.

She ran up the stairs.

* * *

 

_Mysterious facilities. That’s always what they are. Oh, this corporation is secretly evil, or this place holds some ancient missing relic of ultimate whatever, or this dump is a secret overlord’s base and they want to blow up the multiverse twenty-six times because they’re an asshat who probably married their own fedora because no other living being wants to put up with them. Every single time, that’s what everything comes back to: mysterious facilities! Even the damn Underworld counts! “Oh it’s so big and weird and is full of deadness,” well, you know what else is big and full of itself? The Life part of Skylands! Except no-one EVER thinks of it that way. Just like how no one bats an eye at the Swap Force being entirely male, or how the Skylanders will hire humanoids of every flesh tone except brown. Yeah! No brown at all! How the hell has no one else noticed this?!_

_And of course, because NOBODY can EVER lift a finger to help THEMSELVES, we have to get sent in every single time someone stubs their toe or gets looked at funny. All I’ve wanted to do is slaughter every single monster that dares actually pose a THREAT, but you know what high-and-mighty Eon says? No killing! None at all! You know what happened when we let Kaos live? HE DESTROYED THOUSANDS OF PLACES AND LIVES AND NEARLY RIPPED THIS UNIVERSE APART! AND EON SITS ON HIS HIGH HORSE AND_ LETS THIS HAPPEN _!_

_JUST FOR ONCE, I WANT TO SEE EVERY LAST BASTARD BREATHE THEIR LAST AND BURN IN HELL. I SWEAR TO THE CLEARLY-GODLESS MESS OF AN EXISTENCE THAT WE LIVE IN, IF I HAVE TO DRAG THEM DOWN TO OBLIVION WITH MYSELF, THEN SO BE IT, AND I-_

“Can I show you something~?”

Cynder was snapped out of her volatile internal-monologue by Whirlwind's cheery voice. She couldn’t help but notice the irony; a cheerful war-battered child soldier. Because apparently, this world saw nothing wrong with letting preteens nearly die every day. This disgusting, broken world…

“What is it?” Cynder spat out a little harsher than intended.

“The answer…” Whirlwind broke out laughing, as Cynder stood there, confused and worried. "I'm sorry, it's just kind of funny… Ohh, you’ll never get it~" She cleared her throat and gestured to the door she was now standing in front of.

“To which the answer is in a simple facility~”, she sang, as she pushed the door open.

Whirlwind shoved Cynder into the next room, shutting the door behind her and letting it lock with a sharp _click_. Cynder fell forward, landing on a platform, which began to move along a belt of oddly-colored light. Whirlwind hopped onto the platform, waving her arm towards the nearby structure, as Cynder scrambled to her feet, looking about wildly until she saw what Whirlwind had pointed out.

It was a blood-stained conveyor belt.

Looking down, she could see the familiar rainbow-colored river far below them.

_Oh… oh no…_

Slowly, she turned to look at her monochromatic guide, an unnerving realization coming before her as Whirlwind stared down at her, keeping the same cheery expression as always.

“You… _do_ know this place. You…”

“Yep! I've been here the whole time! Actually, I didn't know you were here at first, but then I heard a loud _BANG_ and I thought that maybe someone got in here. I didn't want anyone _falling in anything_ , so I went to check it out and I saw that it was you~! I'm kind of glad, actually. It's kind of really lonely in here. Sort of.”

“Falling in anything? The river? What the hell is it; poison? Acid?!”

“Nonononono!” Whirlwind sputtered back. "That's just to keep it from clogging up. Besides, it’s kind of pretty, isn’t it?”

Cynder backed up as far as she could.

“The falling thingy is… uh…” Whirlwind paused, looking around. Cynder followed her gaze, only for a figure on the conveyor belt to catch her attention.

“Is that- that’s the tryout reject! The sun dragon! _What are you doing to him?!”_

“Eh?” Whirlwind looked around, eventually spotting what Cynder had meant. “Oh! Oh yeah! I almost forgot about that guy.”

 _He disappeared…_ Cynder mouthed to herself.

_But he didn't. Not by himself._

“He was kind of leaving forever and I thought that, you know, since he's kind of obnoxious and probably wasn't coming back…” Whirlwind spoke slowly, “…that, you know… maybe it would be okay to, uh, you know… _borrow_ him and stuff. Except kind of permanently. So it’s not really borrowing. Probably.”

Cynder, horrified, looked down along the belt's path, eventually spotting a gaping metal hole with rapidly-spinning sharp blades.

“What's that?”

Whirlwind looked over at the hole. “Oh, RIGHT! THAT'S the thing I meant!”

Cynder attempted to leap off the moving platform and fly down and pull the sun dragon off the belt, but a forcefield kept her from moving even one inch, centimeter, millimeter, _anything_. She could only watch in vain as the figure reached the end of the conveyor belt and fell into the hole, sending blood and viscera splattering everywhere.

“Ooh, this is the good part~!”

Whirlwind fired a rainbow beam at a marking on their platform, making it speed up, and sending the unprepared undead dragoness sprawling across the slippery glass. The light beam it was moving along dimmed, and a curvier one lit up in its stead; the platform swiveled and slid down the new beam-path. It slowed down next to the ledge the hole was a part of, about fifteen feet below the surface. A faint hissing noise came from the wall, before seven streams of color - primarily green and orange - poured out of seven pipes, emptying their colorful contents into the river.

_A rainbow…_

“Can I start from the beginning with the story-thingy?”

Cynder looked over at Whirlwind, terrified and trapped.

“…I’ll take that as a yes!”

Whirlwind shot another marking, sending the duo spiraling off to places unknown – places Cynder desperately wished she could have avoided.

 

* * *

 

“So I went to this one place once…”

Cynder sat on a pile of pillows. They were kind of old, were made of lots of colors, and they smelled like Pinesol for some reason – born of Whirlwind’s quirkiness, no doubt, but it no longer brought the sense of cheer and comfort that it had in the past.

Whirlwind was standing in front of a hand-drawn map that was attached to some sort of board-thing. The map was kind of cruddy and looked like one of those things people might scribble down when they're high or something.

“It was a place… definitely a place.”

“…Right. Of course,” Cynder muttered.

“It started when I first used my fancy rainbow powers – okay, technically I _got_ them from this, but it still kinda counts. Anyway, there were clouds. And a portal, I think. I ended up in this one place made out of clouds. They were puffy and fluffy and had lots of pillars like Storm Giants, except there weren’t Giants. There were pegasi! Or pterippi, but… nah, that sounds dumb. Y’know?”

“Are you high?”

“Not yet.”

They stared at each other, one more uneasy than the other.

“So I found this one place, and they thought I was some sort of alien 'Aleck Corn' or something. I think they called me a smart aleck. Jerks…” Whirlwind ruffled herself like a wet dog. “Although it _does_ kinda like one of those magical screams from that other Sky place…” She turned towards the right, raised her arm dramatically, and yelled:

“ _AHL ECK ORN!_ ”

A pipe crashed to the ground a dozen yards away, causing the two dragonesses to jump, startled. Whirlwind stared off towards the now-leaking pipe for a few seconds, wide-eyed – the first time Cynder had seen her lose her composure so far.

She then looked back at Cynder, cheery again.

“And then they kind of broke my forehead off, and they did fancy stuff with it, and they fixed it, and now I can shoot rainbows~!” She posed dramatically. “Oh, also, they got their rainbow stuff from a big machine of theirs, and they showed me how to murder people with it to fuel my powers, except they seemed kind of sassy when I killed them with it. I guess I’m not good at taking hints. Or they’re just hypocrites. Jerks.”

She paused. Her eyes wandered, and she looked in the vague direction of where the machine would be. “I mostly put Kaos’ minions in it because no one misses them, but sometimes other people work too. They're kind of louder and they complain a lot, probably because the stuff that happens to them and stuff is, uh, you know, kind of rude, but hey, ‘greater good’ and all, right? I mean, the pterosaur horses treated me like a god, so…” Whirlwind paused, looking up to the ceiling. “Maybe this is what I’m meant to do, you know?”

Cynder began backing away towards a nearby door. “You… you’ve been doing this for years. You monster…”

Whirlwind tilted her head and gave Cynder a puzzled look. “I thought you liked it when people died, though? Unless I’m bad at reading you, too… but still; isn’t this what you wanted?”

Cynder shook her head, eyes wide with horror. “Not like this… not like this…”

“Oh… well, I mean, I’m not gonna stop or anything.” Whirlwind shrugged. “I don’t really have an alternative, and I kinda like it, so if you don’t agree with it, then I guess- CYNDER! CYNDER, NO! STOP! COME BACK! _WAIT!"_

 

* * *

 

 

Cynder ran faster and faster into the darkness, wishing to the godless abyss that there was a way to escape. As she ran, she heard cries echo from down the hall, or from the vents, or from an intercom, or maybe even from the numerous lost souls, all wrung through the cold metallic wringer.

“I WASN’T GOING TO HURT YOU! I PROMISE! WE'RE FRIENDS! _FRIENDS!"_

Cynder burst through a doorway, running through a chamber of lists and data readouts. Several large vats stirred their contents, and a cluster of pipes directed their contents towards a horn-shaped crystal that resembled the Illuminator yet stood for none of the light and hope and possibility that it did and instead fueled something _far worse_.

“MY FAMILY WAS DIFFERENT! THEY HURT ME! YOU NEVER HURT ME! YOU’RE BETTER THAN THAT!”

The chamber emptied into another room, and Cynder jumped up, flying every which way, desperate to find some sort of absolution. She flew past long, metallic arms that held various creatures and beings; a machine that systematically knocked out each and every one in turn; the start of that dreaded conveyor belt; patches of blood from where people had tried to escape, only to be foiled by the sharp blades of the machines.

“I THOUGHT YOU WANTED THIS! YOU WANTED THEM DEAD! I’M DOING NOTHING WRONG! _PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME!"_

Cynder swerved around a corner, trying to hide herself from the pursuing voice.

“"HOLD ON! NO! WATCH OUT!”

A blade-arm sped past Cynder, cutting through one of her wings. She cried out and began to descend towards the bloody belt.

"OH GOD, I’M SORRY! I DIDN’T MEAN TO HURT YOU! PLEASE!”

She crashed into the vile apparatus, taking a few horrible seconds to regain her footing. She spotted multiple metal ledges, then proceeded to leap up them to get away from the belt and get to higher ground and find an exit.

She leapt between two vertical stretches of wall-metal, then clambered onto the higher ledge and ran along a pole that extended from it.

She could see the door.

She ran down the pole, aiming her sights at the ledge in front of the door. If she timed it right, she could glide to the platform, bash the door open, and escape down the hallway. The river-flooded corridor might pose a problem, but even if she couldn't pilot the boat, she was sure she could swim. Anything to escape. Anything to get out.

_"NO!"_

At the bar's end, she leapt, only to realize in vain as she flapped her wings that her injured one would be unable to sustain a glide. Horrified, she could only watch as she hurdled down towards the whirring blades of the hole below.

Someone caught her.

The monster caught her.

And now, trapped between death and damnation, did Cynder realize she had no choice.

“It’s gonna be okay! It’ll be okay!” Whirlwind cried, tears streaming down her grimy face. “We’re gonna go home, and we’ll be happy, and we’ll get everything we want! We can help each other! We…”

“I know _exactly_ what I want,” Cynder spat, her voice dripping with venom. “And that’s to _DRAG YOU DOWN WITH ME!”_

Cynder fired her spectral lightning at Whirlwind’s wings, and Whirlwind let out an agonized shriek as her feathers were burnt to a crisp.

Digging her claws into the pallid flesh, Cynder closed her eyes and ignored the screams as they both descended into hell.

**Author's Note:**

> ((Thank you for reading my story!  
> I don't have anything fancy to say down here, I just felt this would be the best place foorrrr...  
> ...fanart!  
> Since it's based on this fic and it's super cool and stuff, here's some [super-awesome artwork](https://www.deviantart.com/art/The-Facility-725238789) done by TheLeatherDragon!))


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